3D printed astronaut

11/6/2017

As some of you might know I went a little bit quiet over the last few months. The reason being is that I am now fully working freelance. As it's not easy peasy to go this route, stoned with all kinds of complications (and new adventures), I was mostly working and setting up a secure freelance environment (and youtube revenue just isn't).

During summer of 2017, I had multiple animation jobs for a building automation company located in Belgium:

I was still doing a second job at a hostel bar aside from freelance animation, when they found my website and portfolio and ultimately decided to give me a shot to work on their infomercials. They had 3 new hardware devices which they wanted to present in animation so they invited me to Belgium, booked a hotel for me and my girlfriend and showed us the tech first hand.

I guess you can imagine how overwhelming that was...

The moment when someone appreciates you for all the hard work that you put into becoming a better artists... And all of a sudden you can make a living from it.

You need to know that I started CG about 5 years ago after school and after seing Sintel - an open Blender Movie. I knew for quite a while that I wanted to go this route. Film/ Animation, Storytelling. But the decision to start with 3D came out of almost nowhere.

In the following years I lived of 450€/month (voluntary social year in Berlin) to 6€/h to 9€/h all because I had it so firmly in my head that I wanted to become a 3D generalist and one day a filmmaker. My friends and family were supporting me (most of them). And I can call myself very lucky to have them all at my side. This army of good hearts.

Obviously I am still a long way from being a filmmaker ( :D ) but I am trying my best by making babysteps as my best friend would say.

For the upcoming months after the meeting, I worked very hard on the animations. I had gained quite a bit of experience from the waterfilters company for whom I had worked before the FixSus job. They shall get a special mention as they were the first ones to believe in me back then, though I never met them in person.

Anyways...I am very grateful for their trust and help and therefore I turned to my existing Astronaut 3D model and re-modeled it to be printable(in the pose which you can see).

It was quite a tedious, multiple hours journey to get it done, but I think the payoff was ultimately worth it.

Material: Extruded Plastic

I went with E.P. due to cost efficiency only. Unfortunately it's not the best for precision printing which shows in the text segments and smaller details. But 3D printing can be VERY expensive still.If you would like to know more about some of the printing materials then here's a good link by the webservice that I used to print the Astronaut:https://www.trinckle.com/en/info_materials.php#3

The Figure has 3 escape holes, 2 below the astronaut at the locations of the feet and one at the lower end of the backpack. They exist to dispose of the 3D printing powder which can then be used for other prints - therefore cut material costs.

At the front it says FIXSUS which is the company I worked for.And in the back you can see my MoonMan Pictures logo.

As I do not own a 3D Printer myself I turned to the 3D printing solutions company :They did a great job and I am super happy to be able to display it to you today :)

To add a little ''sexy'' to the presentation, I designed, printed, cut out and folded this little box.I'll post a tutorial for you on how to make something like this in Blender when I find the time.

Here's a video showing the print inside the box:

The raw box looks like below. The Black extensions on the sides are there to avoid white outlining at the edges of the box when folded. I printed it on our HP officejet so unfortunately it's not an absolute superb print but it did look pretty good.The 2nd image displays theinterior box. You may try it out yourself by printing this one.

I hope you enjoyed this little excursion into my worklife. I wish you a good day and a moonacious life!

The MoonMan,Johannes

Here's the astronaut with a potato for scale... I know you were waiting for this

Johannes Steidele

- beer brewer -

Just another artist from Berlin working on establishing a film studio to finance the daily pizza and beer.
The goal is to build a german beer brewery on the moon (obviously ! ) and to take the world from there on. Well that
and to find a magic cure to regrow hair